Religion Dispatches
…City, Jewish and Uzbek. I get my trim while listening to Russian-speaking Central Asians scream into their cell phones, all of which are so much cooler than mine; this particular virtual argument was about an order for an organic something that didn’t go through. I guess. Then halfway through my haircut, a South Asian man walks into the barbershop and sits two chairs down from me. He’s wearing a dark brown shalwar qameez, the clothes most commonl…
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…science” were not yet anxious and antipathetic competitors. The spirit of republican individualism unleashed revolutionary forces that would lead to the execution of a king, an atrociously violent civil war, the Cromwellian protectorate, a restored monarchy and the eventual institution of a Bill of Rights of sorts under the aegis of a “Glorious Revolution” in 1688. On the far side of the Atlantic, these same forces, grounded in the rejection of t…
Read More…e Fourteenth Amendment by impinging on fundamental liberties.” This is the central issue in Lawrence v. Texas. In that case, Kennedy found that in Bowers v. Hardwick , the case that had previously upheld sodomy laws, that the court had erred in its interpretation of the 14th amendment. To say that the issue in Bowers was simply the right to engage in certain sexual conduct demeans the claim the individual put forward, just as it would demean a mar…
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…and ultimate commitments. Football is about many things, but perhaps most central to the game is power, not simply in its crudest form but in more subtle and complicated ways. First is the collective power to defeat your opponent that emerges from bodies united by game plan and practice, each player knowing his role, and a more amorphous but critical team spirit shared by all the players. Second is a will to power that is built, ironically, on ce…
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…and His Biographer has influenced me tremendously. As a human being, I’ve always wanted to write like Raymond Chandler. What’s your next book? I want to write a sequel to Armies of Heaven, a book that will study the first fifty years of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. The central question will be, “How in this world do you run a successful government originally founded on an Apocalypse?” As with the First Crusade, there will be blood-soaked ba…
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…ndustrial agriculture, for instance, would become much more difficult. The central logic of a post-carbon world is towards more localized economies, simply because the sun and wind are spread out in a way that fossil fuel isn’t. Another way of saying this: our addiction to fossil fuel is so important that it undergirds and explains our institutions and ideologies more than the other way around. At the theological conference you keynoted in LA rece…
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…any gay Christians). That, combined with a focus on marriage and family as central to community social order, has meant that many LGBT Muslims remain on the “down low”—many in marriages of convenience. In Muslim countries that harshly punish homosexuality, the report notes, those punishments are often drawn from religious teachings about punishing adultery, but without the high evidentiary bar called for in the Qur’an—such as multiple eyewitnesses…
Read More…a pre-existent divine Person that became incarnate in time. But still, one central dispute between the LDS and Trinitarian Christians is over the nature of Jesus’ flesh. Curious. And then there’s the whole association with President Obama, in a time when some people seriously believe that Barack Obama is the slick-tongued hypnotic lying world leader “predicted” in Revelation. (That’s if you’re a dispensationalist, a theological viewpoint that is b…
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…feel about the cover? Love it. Gothic, threatening, weird, touches on the central them of the book in subtle ways…come with me to the darkest part of the forest…you can trust me (insert evil laugh). Thank God they don’t let authors design their own covers. I would have been like, “Lets put Freddy Krueger on it, and some zombies and splash some blood on the spine and put an exorcism image and we need Godzilla and, and…” It would not have been appe…
Read More…hristians.” Now, obviously, Lane is close with the Perry camp. He played a central role in organizing and promoting The Response. His organizations have supported Perry, dating back to 2005 and his leadership of the Texas Restoration Project, which boosted Perry’s reelection race for governor. As the emails Coppins obtained make clear, he’s anti-Mormon. But there’s no evidence that he coordinated with the Perry campaign to put Jeffress front and c…
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